New York City is going to end 2024 having painted the smallest number of bus lanes in six years, and if you ask the person in charge of the Department of Transportation, that's fine.
"We are doing a great job," DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said on Tuesday morning when asked why the city is going to install just five miles of bus lanes in 2024, far below the required 30 miles. "No other city in this nation is able to do the numbers of bus lanes that we do."
Rodriguez picked an odd time for a victory lap because in 2024, the city seemed content to give up on bus lane projects entirely. There have been no specific bus lane projects highlighted by the agency since August, when Streetsblog found there were only four projects slated for this year that totaled about seven miles.
Since then, the city has put red paint down on Second Avenue, 96th Street and Pike Street. But the DOT delayed a planned Tremont Avenue busway to 2025. All told, the three projects the city has finished will total a paltry 5.3 miles of bus lanes for the entire year, which is just 17 percent of the bus lane miles the city is supposed to install per year under the Streets Master Plan.
At this pace, it would take 28 years for the DOT to install the 150 miles of bus lanes that Mayor Adams promised to paint during his first four years in office.
Rodriguez praised his agency's bus projects at a ribbon-cutting for the 96th Street bus lane, which opened this week after a brief spurt of opposition from some Upper West Side residents and Council Member Gale Brewer. The DOT boss suggested it was this process that slowed things down, along with a claim that supporters aren't doing enough to demand more bus lanes.
"With bus lanes, it's required for us to go through community [boards], and sometimes we had to deal with some opposition in some areas," said Rodriguez. "And with New Yorkers, it's also the job of advocating."
But the DOT commissioner wouldn't explain what made this year such a crushing disappointment for bus lane installation when compared to even the two previous years of the Adams administration, which fell short of the 30-mile requirement, but at least hit double digits with 11.9 miles in 2022 and 15.7 miles in 2023.
There are a handful of projects on the horizon for 2025, including the Tremont Avenue busway, a busway on 34th Street in Manhattan, a Flatbush Avenue bus lane of some kind and a so-far undefined bus priority project on Hillside Avenue between Queens and Springfield boulevards. But, the future is never guaranteed, least of all for bus lane projects.
Mayor Adams's political rivals, fresh off a transit-focused candidate forum on Monday night, pounced on Rodriguez giving himself a glowing year-end review.
"I think the Adams administration should stop lying to New Yorkers and start taking the bus," fumed state Sen. Jessica Ramos of Queens.
Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani, also of Queens, also was not ready to blast "Empire State of Mind" to celebrate the year's bus lane totals.
"This administration loves to congratulate itself for doing the absolute bare minimum while systematically violating the Streets Master Plan law," he said. "Riders on the nation's slowest buses suffer the consequences of their failure every single day."
And state Sen. Zellnor Myrie of Brooklyn specifically compared the snail's pace the DOT worked at this year to speeds on a crosstown bus the administration has chosen not to fix.
"Mayor Adams is building bus lanes about as quickly as the Bx12 moves down Fordham Road," said Myrie.
